Four Rules for the Gentiles

We have another interesting and important question for this issue of the News. “Why did the leadership (James, etc.) of the church require the four ‘essentials’ that are listed in each of these three verses: Acts 15:20, 29 and 21:25?”

Acts 13-14 tells the story of Paul’s first missionary trip. He and Barnabas had been gone about a year preaching in different cities of Cyprus and in central Asia Minor or Turkey. Finished, they returned to Antioch in Syria, their home church, and “there they abode long time with the disciples” (14:28).

Some Judaizers from Judea headed north and began to teach in Antioch that circumcision was necessary for salvation (15:1). Paul and Barnabas opposed them and their teaching, and were sent to Jerusalem with others to report to the church there (2-4). The same dispute about circumcision also arose in Jerusalem about that time, and the matter was submitted to the judgment of a council of apostles and elders (5), as well as prophets, such as James, our Lord’s half-brother and the author of a canonical epistle, Judas and Silas (32), and Agabus (11:27-28).

After considerable debate, the counsel of Peter, Paul, Barnabas and James was followed, so it was decided that the Gentiles did not need to be circumcised. The debate over this issue did not end with the council. It continued to trouble the churches and is the subject of Paul’s letter to the Galatians, where he says, “Behold, I Paul say unto you, that if ye be circumcised, Christ shall profit you nothing. For I testify again to every man that is circumcised, that he is a debtor to do the whole law. Christ is become of no effect unto you, whosoever of you are justified by the law; ye are fallen from grace. For we through the Spirit wait for the hope of righteousness by faith” (5:2-5). The debate about circumcision was not over non-essentials but over the gospel itself.

Having established at the council the truth that circumcision is not necessary and the gospel that justification is by faith alone without works, the council decided on four rules, and it commissioned Paul and Barnabas to report these decisions and rules to the Gentile churches (Acts 15:22-26). The rules they set are the four “essentials” to which our reader refers.

The four essentials or rules are “that they [i.e., the Gentiles] abstain [1] from pollutions of idols, and [2] from fornication, and [3] from things strangled, and [4] from blood” (20) or, in a different order, “[1] from meats offered to idols, and [2] from blood, and [3] from things strangled, and [4] from fornication: from which if ye keep yourselves, ye shall do well” (29). These four things, as our reader notes, were mentioned again when Paul returned to Jerusalem from his third and last missionary trip (21:25).

Pollutions of idols in Acts 15:20 is the same as “meats offered to idols” in verse 29. Fornication refers to any sexual sin but probably refers here to the immorality that was part of the worship of idols. Things strangled would be meat of birds or animals that had been killed by strangling and in which the blood was still present. Blood refers to the eating of blood as in blood sausage and such like.

Fornication is always wrong, a violation of the seventh commandment, but the other things are not in themselves evil, though an argument can be made against the eating of blood, since that prohibition was given along with the death penalty to Noah after the flood. Certainly the eating of meats sacrificed to idols was not in itself wrong but forbidden only if it was an offense to others. Paul makes the point in I Corinthians 8 that, even if offered to idols, meat is only meat and has no power to save or damn anyone, an important principle of Christian liberty. Paul tells the Christians in Corinth to avoid offense but also tells them to ask no questions about the meat they purchased in the “shambles,” the meat markets of the day, much of which came from the pagan temples.

Though fornication is listed among the things the Gentiles were to avoid, the decision of the Jerusalem Council emphasized avoiding fornication and the other things because they were especially offensive to the Jews. The Jews regarded the eating of meat from beasts that had been strangled, meat with the blood, as a violation not only of the laws of Moses (Lev. 17:13) but of the precepts God had given Noah after the flood (Gen. 9:4). They also regarded the eating of blood as abhorrent, following the teaching of Leviticus 17:10-14. It was the life of the beast eaten or sacrificed and belonged to God as an atonement for sin. Idolatry and its associated practices were hated by them as well.

The history of the Maccabees, though not inspired or part of sacred history, is important background that illustrates the importance of these rules of the Jerusalem Council in the relationship between the Jewish and Gentile Christians. The four hundred years between Malachi and Christ include the subjugation of the Israelites by the Syrian Seleucid kings, with Antiochus Epiphanes IV being the worst of them. During their dominion, they defiled that which was to the Jews the holiest place of all.

The Seleucid army had set up an idol, probably a bust of Antiochus Epiphanes IV, in the temple, offered swine’s flesh on the altar of burnt offering, forcing the Jews to participate in these heathen rites and to eat the flesh of those idol sacrifices (168 BC). They had introduced temple prostitution into the courts of the temple as well and the temple became a place for drunken orgies dedicated to the worst of the Greek gods. It was no wonder that the things forbidden by the Jerusalem Council would have been particularly offensive to the Jews. The history of Antiochus Epiphanes IV was not long past.

During that same period, the apostasy of many Jews, under the influence of Greek culture and philosophy, would have been remembered by the Christian Jews of Paul’s day with detestation. History speaks of those apostate Jews sporting naked in the gymnasiums, and associating with the Greeks in the sacrifices and pagan worship that often accompanied the Hellenistic infatuation with sports and games. The two apocryphal books of I and II Maccabees, and Daniel 11:31-39 tell some of this history.

This is the best explanation of the rather unusual set of injunctions established by the Jerusalem elders and apostles. The main thing was avoiding giving offense to the Jewish community and that fits the context as well. Paul and Silas had just returned from establishing new churches of largely Gentiles converts. The controversy with the Judaizers over circumcision was raging. It had to be established that circumcision was not necessary for salvation, but it was also needful that the Jews be shown that the rumours about Paul and the Gentile churches were not true. Those rumours are mentioned in Acts 21:20-21: “Thou seest, brother, how many thousands of Jews there are which believe; and they are all zealous of the law: And they are informed of thee, that thou teachest all the Jews which are among the Gentiles to forsake Moses, saying that they ought not to circumcise their children, neither to walk after the customs.” The prohibitions of the Jerusalem Council are then mentioned in Acts 21:25.

All of this is a reminder to us of the important principle, that we must avoid offense, not only in matters of sin but even in things indifferent, things that are not in themselves right or wrong. This principle is established in I Corinthians 8 not only but also in Romans 14. Even in things indifferent, we can cause another to sin, and must be very careful not to do that out of love for a brother. As Paul puts it in I Corinthians 8:13, “Wherefore, if meat make my brother to offend, I will eat no flesh while the world standeth, lest I make my brother to offend.”

Avoiding offense: that was the issue in Acts 15:20. That may seem like a small thing, but is part of manifesting the love of our heavenly Father to others and showing that we have that love of God shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit (Rom. 5:5). Offense cannot sometimes be avoided but it should then be what Paul calls the offense of the cross (Gal. 5:11), the offense that sinful hearts take at the Word of God. It should not be anything that can be avoided, anything personal. Rev. Ron Hanko

John Calvin: “In sum, if love be the bond of perfection and end of the law; if God command that we study to preserve mutual unity among ourselves, and that every man serve his neighbour to edify, no man is so ignorant which doth not see that that is contained in the word of God which the apostles command in this place, only they apply a general rule to their time. Furthermore, let us remember that which I said before, that it was a politic law which could not ensnare the conscience, neither bring in any feigned worship of God; which two vices the Scripture condemneth everywhere in men’s traditions” (Comm. on Acts 15:29).